


Manpain, Empathy, and Cliches

by yourlibrarian



Category: Angel: the Series, Drumline, Supernatural
Genre: Fanvids, Gen, Manpain, Meta, Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:40:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6863857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some thoughts about why women and white males assume the roles they do in stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manpain, Empathy, and Cliches

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Price](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/197416) by thingswithwings. 



> Originally posted June 17, 2011

I imagine that many have seen thingswithwings' new multifandom vid about manpain, [The Price](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/145368.html), but if not, I'd recommend it. Only I'd recommend her accompanying [meta post](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/145564.html) even more because it makes it impossible to miss what her vid was saying. 

I particularly liked this insight:

_At least, that's how Gunn's origin story feels to me; on a show fundamentally about manpain, fundamentally about Angel's manpain, Gunn's "dead little sister" origin story seems like a way of making him heroic and compelling in terms that the show finds meaningful – Angel's terms, the terms of white manpain._

I did remember how the camera cut away from Gunn, thought not the detail from LOST, but yeah, that says it all. So does this:

_Or like the show runners think that, if we don't establish that a female character is important to men, is in a romantic relationship and kissing a dude, we won't care that she's died._

It reminds me of how some men seem to think that the worst insult they can hurl at a woman is to imply that she's of no sexual use to them -- and by extension doesn't deserve to live.

As it happened, I was reading [an article about the Green Lantern movie](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0616/Green-Lantern-is-opening.-Does-it-appeal-only-to-white-American-males) before reading her post, and I think that one of its statements echoes the same viewpoint: "The reason for the Green Lantern being brought to the big screen isn't because he's a white male, but because he's one of the more popular DC Comics superheroes. They attempted to bring Wonder Woman to life, but that's failed many times, as it's just much harder to do seeing how there's much less to work with."

I also had a thought about this statement by thingswithwings:

_there's something going on there, with women's deaths being the requirements for the creation of the story in the first place. Supernatural is nowhere without a mother on the ceiling...All these ways in which women's stories don't exist at all, because women are nothing but pretty props for men's stories – or because women only get in the way of adventure._

This seems entirely Freudian to me, in that men can never be men until they reject the mother figure and abandon her. So the stories simply do this by killing her off and, in some cases, using that death to drive the plot in a revenge story.

The thing about assuming the audience's identity and what the audience is _able_ to identify with seems the most horrific thing to me of all. I don't know if I find it more horrific because it might be _true_ about white (and male) audiences, or if it's only because it's true in the minds of the people with positions and money who create these stories. In other words, I don't know if I should be appalled by the lack of humanity in most of the people around me, or if I should be appalled by how people lacking that sense of humanity and empathy are the ones in power force feeding us this garbage? Or perhaps, the most optimistic viewpoint, if I should be appalled that such people carry such mistaken views about other people because they assume that only they have the ability to empathize. No matter how you slice it, it's a pretty ugly picture.

I recently saw the movie Drumline and was listening to the commentary track. There were some deleted scenes, most done for time or to speed the narrative. Unfortunately some of it was of band performances, which I think they should have done a whole extra disc of -- just those performances in full. But one scene was of a nearly all-white band performing, and the director (I believe he said this was his first film) explained that he was told that there needed to be white faces on the screen for the audience to relate to. So he asked the band to come in and perform for the film. But when he saw the footage he thought they stood out too plainly and that they would be in the film for all the wrong reasons. So he didn't include it and said it was a rookie mistake. I can't say that information was any surprise, but I did find it really unfortunate to hear. I also thought that the studio note was pretty pointless, because the whole reason for the film was to explore, not just the culture of marching bands in general (everyone discussing the film mentioned how it was modeled on sports movies), but specifically, black college bands in the Southern U.S. In other words, the whole point of the film was either to let people see their culture being represented, or for viewers to _learn_ about different aspects of that culture while using a formula familiar to mainstream audiences. 

Interestingly, he also briefly mentioned that he didn't want to do sex scenes in the film, but felt that a kissing scene and some general party scenes were sufficient to convey those aspects of college life. I kind of wished he'd expounded on that because I was curious as to what, specifically, held him back from doing that since I would have assumed it would have helped sell the film (I mean, come on, Zoe Saldana). But I did notice that even though women were a definite side note in the film, with the usual trophy aspect to them, they didn't fare poorly in it. The hero was shown to be from a single mother household, with a close tie to that parent. In fact, another interesting feature of the deleted scenes was a final scene where the hero is reconciled with his absent father. While there was nothing wrong with that scene (or another deleted scene of him celebrating with his girlfriend post-victory), the director seemed to imply that "some people" felt there needed to be a male bonding scene at the end. Instead, he didn't include either that scene or the trophy girlfriend scene, but just ended the film at the moment of the team achieving its victory. To me, that removed some of those masculine cliches from the film -- women as rewards, and achievement as a bridge to paternal reconciliation. I wonder if a white filmmaker would have made the same choice?


End file.
